The best B2B sales techniques for startups

Last week, Mark Elliott, co-founder of Venture Accelerator Partners, gave an Entrepreneurship 101 talk on business-to-business (B2B) sales for startups. In his talk, Mark shared a range of sales techniques that you can start putting into practice today with your own company.

According to Mark, sales is about presenting the right benefits at the right time to the right people with the right frequency. Further, B2B sales is about connecting with the organizations that need the product or service that your company offers because it will help them to increase revenues, decrease costs or expenses, increase productivity or simply avoid any harmful situations.

The following are two key points from Mark’s talk. Watch the video below for the full lecture.

1. Know what benefits you’re selling

Talk to your target customers to find out exactly how they can benefit from the product or service your business provides. Ask questions about the problems they need solved and figure out how your product or service can help them specifically. It’s important to be an evangelist for your business and to know your core value proposition. In complex sales, there may actually be multiple value propositions and your business may benefit different levels of the organization you’re selling to in different ways.

2. Take advantage of social selling

When you’re starting out, you need to begin building relationships and trust with your customers. Set goals to regularly update your social channels—such as LinkedIn and Twitter—with content about what your business does and how you’ve helped customers. Stay focused on the segment you’re selling to and make sure that all of your online assets are clear about the value of your solution.

Watch Mark’s talk to learn all of the best tactics and techniques for selling in a B2B environment.